Why Will No One Hear Our Voice?

by Susan Abulhawa / March 1st, 2008

The Culpability of The Salon du Livre in The Erasure of a Nation

No matter how great the injustice done to us Palestinians or how deeply our grief curls into time and into the earth, it seems the world still refuses to hear our voice and insists that we shall not exist in history except as squatters, terrorists, or subhuman creatures unworthy of our own land and heritage or of the right to defend ourselves and resist oppression. The latest institution to contribute to the erasure of millennia of our Palestinian culture and history is the Salon du Livre, with great influence from the French Ministry of Culture.

Every year this book fair chooses one country to honor and showcase its contemporary writers. This year, the choice was Israel: a 60 year old country established in place of the ancient land of Palestine with an imported population (Europe, the former Soviet Union, U.S.A., Ethiopia, etc.) in place of the native population, the Palestinians, who were ethnically cleansed from most of the land and who still languish in the abject conditions of refugee camps, under a cruel military occupation, or at the whims of winds that swirl us about in a Diaspora. Israel, with an abysmal human rights record, leading the world with the most violations of international laws and UN Resolutions, has taken a land once multi-religious, multi-ethnic, and multi-cultural and turned into a place of exclusivity for Jews only. This country, called an Apartheid State by moral authorities the likes of Desmond Tutu and Jimmy Carter and accused of Nuremburg crimes by leading scholars of international law like Drs. Francis Boyle and Richard Falk, is the nation that France has chosen to celebrate at its most celebrated Book Fair.

Yet, until recently, I thought we still had a chance in March. I naively thought that France would welcome our narrative and present my book, The Scar of David, especially since the French version (Les matins de Jenine) is being released on 6 March. It is a story that I pulled it from the depths of my country’s anguished soul and from the most primal scream to be heard and recognized for the violated nation that we are. But no Palestinian [even Palestinian-Israelis] are invited and I was thus encouraged not to come.

How can this be? Do they know that Israel sits on top of emptied Palestinian villages? The crops that Israelis eat come from a soil fertilized and made rich from the bodies of my Palestinian ancestors and fruit from trees planted by those same ancestors, starting with my grandparents and going back centuries if not millennia? I am unquestionably a daughter of Jerusalem, even if Israel deems me not to be human enough to live and thrive there as all my ancestors before me have. Does the Salon du Live wish to pretend, as Israel does, that Palestine and Palestinians do not and never did exist? Do they know Jesus was Palestinian and many Palestinian Christians can trace their ancestry to the first century? There are Palestinians whose surnames are “Canaan”. No Israeli has roots that sink as deeply into that land as the dispossessed Canaan family must! Has it occurred to the organizers that those Hebrew tribes that existed in Palestine 3,000 years ago are more likely to be my ancestors [if indeed genetic continuity is possible over such a period], not the ancestors of Russian Jews or any other imported Israeli ethnic group?

Or is the Salon du Livre simply complicit in the ongoing efforts of Israel to rid the world of us and any memory of our heritage, culture, history and gaping wound?

The world has roared with contempt at Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s alleged desire to wipe Israel off the map. And yet, Israel has actually been slowly wiping Palestine off the map for the past 60 years, in deeds and words. Every day acres of land are confiscated from what little remains to us of Palestine in order to build Jewish-only domains. Every day our men and women, as young as 12, suffer in their jails and torture chambers without charge or trial. At every turn, there is a wall, a bullet, or a checkpoint to deny, starve, or humiliate and break us. Death constantly comes at us from air land and sea with the most sophisticated weaponry. Every hope or dream we might have suffocates in refugee camps unfit for human beings but which our proud people have endured for more than half a century. Recently the commissioner-general of UNRWA warned that “Gaza is on the threshold of becoming the first territory to be intentionally reduced to a state of abject destitution, with the knowledge, acquiescence and–some would say–encouragement of the international community.” So, the world watches life being slowly and deliberately extinguished in Gaza, as Israel, with unbearable irony, turns Gaza into a massive concentration camp. And around the world, the voices of our leaders, artists, writers, and activists are silenced, ever we try to speak, to protest, or scream in agony for help. Yet our demise is met not with contempt, but with muffling of our painful narrative and celebration at international book fairs like the Salon du Livre!!

Why??

What have we done to deserve such a fate? What have we done to France or to the world that no one will stand against such injustice? Everything has been taken from us and our hearts carved out because we are not Jewish! What has been our crime that we should be so excluded from the human race, forced to negotiate endlessly with our oppressors for the basic human rights accorded to the rest of humanity? Spoken of as if animals when we dare to fight back? Why will no one hear our voice? What hope do we have if even lovers of books will pretend we do not exist and therefore have no story worth reading?

I still plan to go. I figure if little Palestinian boys with rocks are brave enough to fight soldiers with rifles and tanks, I shouldn’t be afraid of facing hypocrites with books and a suspect agenda.

38 comments on this article so far ...

Greetings Ms Abuldawa. It is good to see your article here especially in the light of the carnage being enacted in Gaza at the moment. This follows the most inhumane siege that your compatriots there have endured for nearly two years almost coinciding with the 60th anniversary of the seizure of the Palestinians’ lands. The Israeli action is outrageous and beyond all belief and conscience.

More and more are hearing your voice and you will be heartened that the renowned Israeli author and Greek scholar, Aharon Shabtai, will not attend the Turin Book Fair. I quote what he said about the Salon du Livre in a recent interview:-

Aharon Shabtaï : This event will be opened by the French president Sarkozy and the Israeli president Shimon Perès. Given this situation, going to the “Salon du livre” of Paris as a writer, with the Israeli delegation, means that you are going dressed with the colour of the Israeli flag. Every day, Israel commits war crimes and imposes collective punishments on the Palestinians. There is no reason to celebrate anything.

Israel violates all international laws. Not only the Geneva Convention. The Hague International Court of justice condemned the illegal wall that Israel has built on confiscated Palestinian land. The book event, or any other kind of exhibition in which the Israeli State is invited, is not a way to promote peace in the Middle East, and not a way to bring justice to the Palestinians, but only propaganda to give Israel an image of being a liberal and democratic society. A State which maintains an occupation and commits daily crimes against civilians does not deserve to be invited to whichever cultural week. We cannot accept to be part of that. Israel is not a democratic State but an apartheid State. We cannot support that State at all.

Your country has my support and I stand in solidarity with your people. The world must listen.

Yes, for what little it is worth, I can stand fully behind the Palestinian cause. The state of Israel was founded on an opportunistic whim, and has done nothing but send increasingly less stable shock waves through the region.

Israel’s time will come, just keep that in mind. It may not be tomorrow, or ten years or fifty years from now – but it will come.

All of this is not a sign of Palestinian defeat, but of Palestinian victory. The French Jews, who have enormous influence in the media, are running scared and are even starting to get hysterical. They saw Sarkozy, whose maternal grandmother was Jewish, as their last hope. It is now being said that the appointment of Bernard Kouchner as FM was due to pressure from certain Jewish groups. Kouchner is far from being an extremist, but extremely vain and a total political novice, he has made a royal mess. Sarko’s polularity has gone through the floor and he is looking at a massive defeat in next Sunday’s municipal elections.

His latest, desperate, panicky, attempt to court the Jewish vote blew up in his face. He wanted primary school kids to be forced to “adopt” a French Jewish child killed during the Holocaust. The reaction of the mainstream Jewish organisations was horror! They didn’t say it, but it inevitably focused people’s attention on Palestinian children being killed by the Israelis!

In addition, the French media are already comparing Vladimir Putin to Stalin! This is the president of a country which, like France, is party to the European Convention on Human Rights and subject to the compulsory jurisdiction of the European Court of Human Rights! If only that Yukos guy hadn’t been Jewish! Putin would probably be the hero of the hour!

So I hope Ms Abulhawa will go to the Salon. The desire to exclude her is based on fear and her presence would her message to the organisers that that it is they who are afraid of her, not she who is afraid of them!

Residents of the city of Madison, Wisconsin, USA sought several years ago to make Madison a sister city of Rafah. The Zionist reaction was immediate and forceful and able to kill the effort. The Zionist lobby in the U.S. is vastly more powerful than many realize, and every sitting legislator in the U.S. Congress fears it. On the other hand, the sudden charge of “anti-Semite” at every mention of concern for the Palestinian plight has been overused to such an extent (e.g., that charge directed at Jimmy Carter) that it has lost its sting. The very word “Zionism” is taking on very evil connotations within the progressive community. Here is a quote from Francis Boyle (mentioned in the above article).

“I spoke with the head military lawyer for the IDF, Joel Singer, and I said ‘You know, I’m two weeks here. It’s clear you people are inflicting Nuremberg crimes on the Palestinians, exactly what the Nazis did to the Jews. What’s your explanation?’ He said ‘Military necessity’. Notice, he didn’t disagree with me. I said ‘That argument was rejected at Nuremberg when the lawyers for the Nazis made it.’ So then he said, ‘Well, we have public relations people in the United States, and they handle these matters for us.’ ”
— Francis Boyle, Professor of International Law, University of Illinois

Well, nothing new about jewish Nazis. Bryan Rigg’s award winning book “Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers” documents countless cases, quote:
“Rigg reveals that a startlingly large number of German military men were classified by the Nazis as Jews or partial-Jews, in the wake of racial laws first enacted in the mid-1930s. Rigg demonstrates that the actual number was much higher than previously thought–perhaps as many as 150,000 men, including decorated veterans and high-ranking officers, even generals and admirals.” And where did these soldiers end up after the war..?

Close to 1% (150,000 out of 17 million) of soldiers who served in Hitler’s armed forces were of at least partly Jewish origin. This fact needs to be kept in mind whenever defenders of Israel trot out statistics pointing out that through most of Israel’s 60 years Druze Muslims have served in IDF–albeit often as cannon fodder. Interestingly, in recent times because of “an awakening of nationalistic feelings among the Druze”, they’re no longer signing up for military duty in the same numbers as in the past:

Israel had always viewed the Druze as some type of domesticated beast, but now this previously docile animal is fighting back.

this weekend, Levantine sources report three US warships — including the guided missile destroyer USS Cole — cruising the Lebanese coastline while Kuwait and the Saudis urge their citizens to leave Lebanon…
“immediately…”

Apparently, patrolling US gunboats may be in response to issues arising from the current Lebanese constitutional crisis, the upcoming Arab League summit in Damascus, or the Whore of Alabama’s forthcoming visit to the region, bringing with her even more of the BOSS’s crazed, nihilistic, West-Texan-Armageddonist notions re. [quote]

“the birth pangs of the new Middle East…”

To the south,
the Neoliberal Empire’s most lauded, most favored, most heavily armed and abundantly funded regional kaporegime — currently managed by
Reich Gauleiter Ehud Olmert,
instructs its Brigadefuhrer Avi Mizrachi and his assembled homicide squads to protect the Holy Judenstaat’s “security” by striking at [quote]

“the terror organizations and those who provide them with cover and the ability to operate.” [unquote]

consist of lightly armed Arab partisan-fighters squaring up street by street, house by house to brigades of Israeli Einsatzgruppens
— “hiding behind” sixty-ton Merkava tanks and DC9 bulldozers,
whilst the Israeli Lufftwaffe rains down instant targeted death from above in what, I fear, are the partisan’s final forlorn attempts to defend the democratically elected Palestinian government’s very own “Alamo” — or, more accurately its ‘Warsaw Ghetto’
— [i.e. the Gaza Strip, March, 2008]

2. “…and those who provide them with cover and the ability to operate”

— consisting of 1.4 million “Protected Persons” [Geneva Convention]
with its sick, its lame, its hospitalized, its traumatized old men, women and kids stumbling around with candles in the blackouts,
and who “the terrorist-militant-extremists”
— or so we’re informed by Israel’s very own Jo Goebbells
— that Sth African born [??] fuckin reptile — Mark Regev

— [quote] “…HIDE BEHIND…” [unquote]
———————————————

Listen up World…
one might just hear Brigadefuhrer Jurgen Stroop’s voice from beyond the grave,

Yah und Jawol,
— come on out guys and dine with Stroop’s Waffen SS armoured brigades,
— prior, that is to any survivors and their extended families being slung inside cattle wagons en route to meeting their makers in the gas ovens of Auschwitz — once the firing stops, the dust clears, and the one-sided bloodbath is finally over…

What I damn well ADMIRE about these holed-up Arab fighters,
— is that just like Warsaw’s Jews, they KNOW they’re going to die —
but they AINT going to their graves without taking at least some carnivorous, jackbooted, Judeo-Nazi bullies with em…!

Meanwhile,
as the “Judenrat” in Ramallah discontinues “negotiations” with his/their torturers and tormentors, and the adjacent ghetto in Lodz [Hebron/West Bank] explodes into violence, the Whole World voyeuristicly watches…

a deplorably anesthetized made-for-non-stop-24-hour TV spectacle, where the official running narrative is permitted to oscillate ONLY around notions concerning the use, or misuse of “Disproportionate Force”

but we’d prefer it if you’d kill them slowly and incrementally, at levels our impeccable Pee-Ar agencies can fog, obscure, image-manage and render at least partially invisible to mainstream, post-Enlightenment, Western liberal-democratic “values”, and to all those “civilized” sensibilities “WE” so dearly cherish and so preciously uphold…

During this wretched, grotesque, depraved and sickening exercise, intended I reckon by its perpetrators to accurately measure and precisely determine optimal threshold levels of Palestinian-Arab pain and agony, the sane here may be forgiven for inquiring whether or not these are indeed the opening salvos of the Zio-Nazi states’ “Enlosung”

On at least two occasions this week, Hamas staged scenes of darkness as part of its campaign to end the political and economic sanctions against the Gaza Strip, Palestinian journalists said Wednesday.
[Palestinians attend a…]

Palestinians attend a candlelight march against severe fuel cuts that also led to power cuts, in Gaza City. Were some of them staged?
Photo: AP

In the first case, journalists who were invited to cover the Hamas government meeting were surprised to see Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh and his ministers sitting around a table with burning candles.

In the second case on Tuesday, journalists noticed that Hamas legislators who were meeting in Gaza City also sat in front of burning candles.

But some of the journalists noticed that there was actually no need for the candles because both meetings were being held in daylight.

#2 Brave Hamas Fighters? Hahahahahaha!

“…What I damn well ADMIRE about these holed-up Arab fighters,
– is that just like Warsaw’s Jews, they KNOW they’re going to die —
but they AINT going to their graves without taking at least some carnivorous, jackbooted, Judeo-Nazi bullies with em…!”

The sources said Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh sent urgent messages to the leaders of Egypt, Jordan, Qatar and Saudi Arabia urging them to work toward ending the IDF military operations in the Gaza Strip.

The sources told The Jerusalem Post that Haniyeh and other Hamas leaders also appealed to Turkey to intervene and convince Israel to halt its offensive.

Hamas’s apparent readiness to reach a cease-fire with Israel is seen by some Palestinians as evidence of the Islamist movement’s concern that it may lose control over the Gaza Strip should the military operations continue. …

It is interesting that this article vanished, in February, and now it is back!
Well, I wrote then that Palestinian Rights are human rights, and that the international community should have stopped crimes against humanity more than fifty years ago!

If I was Egypt or an Arab Middle Eastern nation I would probably work to make peace with Israel too, that is just a matter of self-preservation. Because when you fight Israel, you don’t actually fight the Jews. You fight Jews with nukes and the most modern weapons around thanks to the Americans.

Declaring war on Israel is akin to declaring war on the United States. Do you honestly think that if the Syrians (hypothetically) occupied Tel Aviv that the US wouldn’t send troops in?

I don’t think anyone in here is denying the military stranglehold that Israel holds in the region.

And, I might add, you’re quoting the JERUSALEM POST, you honestly think that is an unbiased source to quote on matters such as these . . . christ. This could be why you are so keen to defend Zionists – you read THEIR newspapers and propaganda.

“you’re quoting the JERUSALEM POST, you honestly think that is an unbiased source to quote on matters such as these ”

Thanks D.R., at least the JPost is a real newspaper and a real source. We get all kinds of crap posted here that people post as “facts” but are just unsubstantiated hateful fiction, nearly always hateful towards Jews.

ie:

Jim R. said on February 23rd, 2008 at 8:59 pm #

Why does the Talmud profess that the Jews are the only people to have souls and are of God..”

Jaime, just because much of what appears here exposes the crimes comitted by the Israeli government, that does not make it ” hateful towards Jews.” Not all Jews are Zionists and not all turn a blind eye to the oppression of Palestinians.

I second Susan Abulhawa’s astonishingly timely plaint. As well as believe that, in M. Kenny’s posted words following it, “All of this is not a sign of Palestinian defeat, but of Palestinian victory.” However, M. Kenny continued with the sentence, “The French Jews, who have enormous influence in the media, are running scared and are even starting to get hysterical.”

And the eleventh commandment occurred to me this morning: Thou shalt not confuse Israelis with Jews.

jaime, the exact position of orthodox Jewry was pithily summed up by Rabbi Kook the Elder, who stated, ‘There is a greater difference between the soul of a Jew and a non-Jew than there is between the soul of a non-Jew and an animal’. The proof of the pudding is in the eating. The Israeli state has no compunction in targeting children, bombing mosques, schools, hospitals, shops, fleeing and terrorised, civilians waving white flags; we know the wretched reality . Civilian targets are bombed on the fraudulent excuse that a ‘terrorwist’ was somewhere in vicinity. Murder by reckless negligence is still murder. And then they lie, with fiendish relish and practised accomplishment. As various Israeli rabbinical authorities have stated over and over again, the murder of civilians in time of war is not only acceptable, once again illustrating Judaic contempt for international law, and the religious conviction that Jews are above mere human law, but is in fact a mitzvah, or good deed.
Still, opposition to Israeli Nazism is not merely a matter of rescuing the Palestinians from monsters of sadism and cowardly cruelty. We must rescue the Israelis and Jews themselves from evil. Despite the lurid phantasies, or cynical lies, of the jaimes, no-one wishes to exterminate the Jews. Indeed the use of the victims of the Judeocide in this manner, as some type of justification for the barbaric mistreatment of another people, is a moral crime of incalculable infamy. As Israel and Jewry slip deeper and deeper into neo-Nazi crimes, as more and more transmogrify into creatures like jaime, who exult in cruelty and murder, a ghastly process of transference is at work. I don’t for a second doubt that the God-ordained cruelty of the Torah, with its endless admonitions to kill the enemy to the last woman and child play their part. Just Google Arabs as Amalek, and you can see that calls for outright extermination of the Palestinians are common in Israel, rarely criticised, and justified by allusion to the Torah story, and fable is certainly is, of God’s enemy Amalek, upon whose head and that of his people, another genocide must fall. Nor do I doubt that fear and hatred born of the Judeocide play a part. But at base I feel this is a human, rather than a Jewish problem. Israel and Jews like jaime, have, in my opinion, simply become more and yet more wicked because they have got away with it. And conversely, as they are extreme racists, resistance from human beings they regard as mere animals, makes the anger the greater. Precisely as with the Nazis, or the English after the First Indian War of Independence. Even worse is the rage after the Arab ‘scum’ actually flog ’em, as Hezbollah did in 2006. That really gets their racial supremacist egos in a lather. Which reminds me-jaime, if you’re such a little Jewish hero, boasting endlessly of turning Gaza into a parking-lot, and, supposedly, fearful that the wounded and damaged Gazan children intend marching the Jews into the sea, how is it that you luxuriate in safety, steaming yourself slowly, in complete safety. No bottle, eh?

This is utter bullshit too: Another of Mulga’s sick and racist fantasies.
The Hamas purposely sacrifice their own people as human shields as they wage war. They’re the ones guilty of war crimes if anybody. Plus, they deliberately target civilian populations with these random missile and mortar attacks.

Back in May 2007 former Sephardi chief rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu advocated carpet bombing Gaza. Eliyahu maintained that there was absolutely no prohibition in Jewish ethics against the indiscriminate killing of civilians during a potential massive military offensive on Gaza. Eliyahu maintained that the entire population of Gaza was “collectively responsible” for the firing of Kassam rockets on Sderot. The chief rabbi advocated carpet bombing Gaza “regardless of the price in Palestinian life.” To justify his position, Eliyahu quoted from Psalms: “I will pursue my enemies and apprehend them and I will not desist until I have eradicated them.” Eliyahu’s son, Shmuel Eilyahu, the chief rabbi of Safed, was quoted as saying: “If they do not stop after we kill 100, then we must kill a thousand. And if they do not stop after 1,000 then we must kill 10,000. If they still do not stop we must kill 100,000, even a million. Whatever it takes to make them stop.” The position of Orthodox Jewry is clear: Palestinians must be eradicated. The Shoah has begun!!! The source of these quotations is the Jerusalem Post, May 30, 2007. It was widely quoted elsewhere as well (except in the Zionist controlled American mainstream press).

Right now, Jaime, it is not Hamas, but the vicious and murderous IDF that is deliberately and indiscriminately targeting civilian populations in Gaza. They slaughtered over 100 innocents last week alone, several of whom were babies. Following the suggestion of chief rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu (whose name will live forever in infamy along with those of Himmler and Eichmann), the IDF is even killing babies for the alleged crime of being “collectively guilty” of firing Kassam rockets. What evil and horror the wretched Zionist enterprise has loosed upon the earth. And you defend the evil of the Zionist pariah state, Jaime. Shame on you!!!

Good onya, Ray. It’s reminiscent of the Yesha Council of Torah Sages and Rabbis during the war against Lebanon in 2006. The good Rabbis announced that the prohibition on killing civilians in time of war was ‘Christian morality’. In Jewish religious law killing civilians during conflict was , they decreed,actually a mitzvah, or good act. Now, of course, I’m not saying every Israeli or Jew is a slavering child-murderer. Indeed many decent Israelis and other Jews resolutely resist their country and their people’s descent into neo-Nazi brutality. But, as our little mate jaime, visibly chafing at the lack of opportunity to demonstrate his martial valour, but gallantly leading, from the rear, in his bunker in a steam-bath near you, shows, some Jews and many Israelis get a definite buzz from killing basically defenseless civilians. This coming from a people so recently treated in similar fashion, if even worse degree, is an infamy and moral tragedy at the same time. Speaking of jaime, the Kook quote was from Israel Shahak’s revealing ‘ JewishReligious Fundamentalism in Israel’, and the exact quote is,’ The difference between a Jewish soul and souls of non-Jews-all of them in all different levels- is greater and deeper then the difference between a human soul and the souls of cattle’. No doubt jaime will now demand a tape-recording.Now, no-one is suggesting this attitude is omnipresent in Israel, but it certainly is widespread. I guess I must ask jaime if he himself holds such an opinion, and what is his opinion on the views of Jewish religious extremists who, apart from believing that the killing of civilians is a ‘good deed’, also advocate the death penalty for homosexuality. Ouch!

Jaime (being his typical racist self) says “It’s the Arabs and Iranians who kill the gays who get outed.” Matthew Shepherd, I suppose, was killed by Iranians! I wonder if Sephardi chief rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu has yet found a justification in Jewish ethics for stoning gays to death. I’m sure he is looking for one.
Jaime forgets to say that it’s the Israelis who kill babies because of their “collectively guilt” for the deeds of adults. And yes, rabbi Eliyahu has found justification in Jewish ethics for this evil deed. And despite this we are supposed to think that Israelis are somehow more moral and civilized than Arabs and Iranians, neither of whom have dropped bombs on any babies this week.

This is a brand new article by Felicity Arbuthnot called Advancing the Peace which is published on Global Research. Unlike you, she has a deep concern and love for humanity which shines out like a light. She also shows a complete understanding of Middle East politics acquired from her long experience and personal observations in Iraq. Therefore she speaks with great knowledge. Do not attempt to denigrate her or her work – she would be way above all that pettiness.

Which Israeli babies (or other Israeli civilians) were killed last week by bombs dropped by Iranians or even by Arabs? The answer is : NONE. How many Palestinian babies were killed by bombs dropped by Israelis last week? The answer: 4. How many other Palestinians were killed by bombs dropped by Israelis last week? The answer: over a hundred. And you have the effrontery to ask me if I’m kidding. Am I correct in assuming that you could not keep a straight face when you were posing the question? Such obtuseness, Jaime, does not speak well for your intellectual and critical abilities and only makes you look bad.

‘A book fair in Paris has become the subject of controversy with several Muslim countries announcing boycotts because the guest of honour is Israel. Saudi Arabia has become the latest to withdraw, following Iran, Lebanon, Yemen, Tunisia, Morocco and Algeria.

The Islamic Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Isesco) has also urged its 50 members to pull out from the fair, which starts on 14 March. Isesco said Israel had committed crimes against humanity in Palestinian areas.

The organisers of the book fair have said their aim is to honour literature and promote dialogue between cultures’.
_______________________________________________________This has been reported on BBC News today.

VILLIERS-LE-BEL, France, Feb 18, 2008 (AFP) — Hundreds of French police, including special forces, raided a troubled Paris suburb at dawn Monday to round up suspected ringleaders of riots last year.

Police said they had detained 33 of the 38 people on their target list during one of the biggest operations of its kind ever staged in France.

Members of the RAID special police force, led the operation on about 10 apartment blocks in Villiers-le-Bel and surrounding districts, north of the capital, which was the focus of three nights of serious riots from November 25.

A column of armoured vehicles brought the police into the town under cover of dark.

While some guarded the building entrances, groups of 30 police then raided each apartment, according to an AFP correspondent at the scene.

A special “anti-gang” armoured car, bullet- and firebomb-proof, was used as the command centre as police headed for different apartments searching for suspects and evidence.

“I have never seen a police operation of this scope,” prosecutor Marie-Therese de Givry told a press conference staged at the town’s McDonald’s burger restaurant.

“I hope that the inhabitants will understand that we are there to re-establish order and peace,” she added….

Got you – you failed to copy the important bit. Muslim people corralled into ghettoes, massive unemployment, police oppression and yes your crowning glory Mr Sarkozeeeeeeeeeeeeee (ex Mossad operative and of Jewish stock) is falling in the popularity stakes and municipal elections are looming. Sounds very much a police state to me and who is setting the fireworks off?
___________________________________________________
THIS IS THE REST OF THE ARTICLE LINKED ABOVE GOOD PEOPLE
___________________________________________________
……………….
Violence flared in Villiers-le-Bel and surrounding towns on November 25 after two teenagers died in a motorbike crash with a police car.

During three nights of rioting, some officers were hit by gunfire and the clashes left 119 police officers injured, five seriously, according to justice ministry figures. No figure has been given for casualties among the young rioters.

In December, police handed out leaflets in the area calling for witnesses to the shots fired.

The leaflets offered rewards, going up to several thousand euros (dollars), for information and said sources could remain anonymous.

Sources close to the inquiry, said at least three people came forward to give information that pointed to the role of two brothers in Villiers-le-Bel.

President Nicolas Sarkozy said immediately after the riots that everything would be done to find those responsible for the attacks. “That cannot rest unpunished, it is an absolute priority,” he said.

Tensions have run high in France’s high-immigration suburbs since the country’s worst civil unrest in decades in 2005.

Sarkozy this month launched an aid programme for France’s poor suburbs, where the populations have a high proportion of African immigrants and where youth unemployment runs around 40 percent.

But the president also vowed a “war without mercy” against crime.

Segolene Royal, the Socialist candidate who lost to Sarkozy in the presidential election, criticised the raids as a “police operation for the media” just before municipal elections in France.

Y’know, all kinds of immigrant groups and come through Paris and France.
There were numbers of Russians in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution and WW1, Vietnamese in the mid 20th century, but none are remembered to have been as ethnically divisive or as restive as the North Africans, Berbers and Arabs, or more particularly their descendants.

Maybe you think that burning cars and rioting is intelligent expression and “social justice.”

The problem, Jaime, is that when IDF bombadiers (how many of them are Ashkanazi immigrants from Europe?) fly over Palestinian homes and villages and drop bombs which kill innocent men, women, children and even babies, you do think that these barbaric war crimes are both “civilized” and an “intelligent expression” of social justice. For shame!

There is a “world of difference” between Hamas and the Palestinians? I agree. The IDF are racists, illegal occupiers of land that does not belong to them and war criminals. The Palestinians, including Hamas, are allowed under international law to resist illegal occupation. I personally disapprove of all violence and would like to see both sides lay down their arms and wage peace instead of war. But blaming the victim and pretending that the victimizer is really the victim, as you do, is unconscionable.

You see Ray, that for the Judeofascist elect, the lives of non-Jews have no value. For the likes of jaime, the hundreds of Gazans, and not a few on the West Bank, slaughtered since the boycott of the democratically electedHamas government was imposed, simply are of no account.
As Rabbi Kook the Elder, and a veritable menagerie of other fundamentalist Rabbis, have told us, the Jews are a different order of creation to non-Jews. Thus for the jaimes of this world, the one or two Jews killed by Qassams, are a Universe shaking tragedy, while the obliteration, evisceration, burning to death or simple extermination of Gazan goyim is a matter of utter indifference. No, a matter for celebration, as God ordains the extermination of his enemies down to the last baby. It is, as the Rabbis of the Yesha Council said during the slaughter in Lebanon, a mitzvah, a good deed, to slaughter civilians in time of war.
No wonder the words of these crazed monsters are kept from the world public. The reality of what Israel has become, and the mass slaughter its rulers, secular and religious, plan to unleash on the Arab Middle East, must be hidden from the public. While there are many Israelis such as the estimable B’tselem, who vigorously resist their country’s descent into Nazism, they are relatively powerless. A grim future looms. Israel has become a cancer, not only in the Middle East, but throughout the world, its brutality and contempt for International Law, an incitement to fascist, racist monsters everywhere.

I’ll be brief too,
after all, we’ve seen it all before… plenty of times…

back to the 1940s…

“There was a world of difference in the Waffen SS’ response to attacks from the “terrorist bandits” in the ghetto of Warsaw — who refused to come out and tango with Brigadefuhrer Stroop’s mechanized SS armor divisions — but instead chose to “deliberately sacrifice” their own people by “Hiding Behind” their “Civilian population.”

[ref. Mark Regev 3 days ago — or indeed, see any old Zionist Hasbara-speak issued over the last 60 years]

“The “International Juden-Bolshevik-Banking House Conspiracy” also deliberately used and sacrificed all of Europe’s people as cover for attacks on Germany in 1914. It was assymetrical warfare. If not for the Versailles Treaty, the Luftwaffe wouldn’t have flown over Europe 15 years later.”

[meaning you can use any old excuse to engineer a land-heist and its accompanying bloodbaths — see e.g. Moshe Sharrett’s ‘Diary’ re. early 1950s Zionist plans for the region — especially Lebanon.]

“No other country would put up with being attacked like that on their borders. Unless of course rabid Anti-Aryans condemn the rights of Deutschland
1. — to Defend Itself,
2. — to gather all Germans, dispersed across Europe — indeed dispersed all across the World — into ONE Reich, under ONE flag,
3. — and, by pouring forth thereafter and conquering Her own unique “Lebensraum” at the expense of all those “lesser breeds” standing in Our way, finally realize the glorious destiny that Gawd has harbored in Our Nations’ soul for the last 2000 years…”